What Voters in the 6th Congressional District Should Know about Republican Congressman Peter Roskam

In his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009, President Obama, at the very outset of his administration, promised to “root out the waste, fraud, and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier.” In recent days, we have begun to see the President’s promise become a reality.

Obama’s  F.Y. 2010 budget proposal, released on May 10, included a $1.7 billion increase over five years to the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program. That program, under the joint direction of the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, was established in 1996 by The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), under President Clinton.

On May 20, new Attorney General Eric Holder and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new interagency effort, the Health Care Fraud Prevention and Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), to combat Medicare fraud. HEAT will build on efforts begun with significant success under the Bush administration:

The HEAT team will include senior officials from DOJ and HHS who will build upon and strengthen existing programs to combat fraud while also investing new resources and technology to prevent fraud, waste and abuse before it happens. Efforts will include the expansion of joint DOJ-HHS Medicare Fraud Strike Force teams that have been successfully fighting fraud in South Florida and Los Angeles. Established in 2007, these teams have a proven record of success using a “data-driven” approach to identify unexplainable billing patterns and investigating these providers for possible fraudulent activity. The Medicare Fraud Strike Force team operating in South Florida has already convicted 146 defendants and secured $186 million in criminal fines and civil recoveries. After the success of operations in South Florida, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force expanded in May 2008 to phase two in Los Angeles, where 37 defendants have been charged with criminal health care fraud offenses. To date in the Los Angeles cases, more than $55 million has been ordered in restitution to the Medicare program.

“We know these strike forces work. I believe a targeted civil and criminal enforcement strategy in these locations will have a substantial impact on deterring fraud and abuse, protecting patients and the elderly from scams, and ensuring that taxpayer funds are not stolen,” said Attorney General Holder.

Republican Congressman Peter Roskam recently established his “Medi-FraudAlert” blog on his Congressional web site as a “forum to discuss the massive waste, fraud and abuse in the current Medicare and Medicaid systems”. Roskam absurdly states these costs could reach $500 billion annually. (The total cost of Medicare is only about $450 billion.) But the costs of fraud are significant – 3% or more of total health expenditures, 10.5% of federal Medicaid expenditures by one estimate. Roskam’s blog does a good job of highlighting some of the Obama administration’s early successes in combating fraud:

June 25:  A day after a $100 million fraud was exposed, yesterday, 53 people were indicted in a $50 million Medicare fraud scheme spanning from Detroit to Miami. The scheme involving patients, doctors, medical assistants and company owners, focused on Medicare claims submitted for unnecessary or never delivered treatments mostly for HIV-related drugs and physical therapy treatments.

June 29: Friday, eight Miami-area residents were arrested and charged with attempting to defraud Medicare for $22 million – having already paid out $15.3 million of those claims from Medicare. The Miami Herald reports that this was the prosecutors’ “first crackdown on home healthcare offenders in a decade.” In this case, two firms were raided, had their bank accounts frozen, and stand accused of filing bogus claims mostly for homebound diabetic services. ABC Home Health Care submitted $17 million in false claims since January 2006, and has already been paid $11.3 million in taxpayer money. Florida Home Health Care Providers filed $5.5 million in false claims since October 2007, being compensated with $4 million of taxpayer money.

June 30: Yesterday, a Miami doctor was sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay more than $9 million in restitution for his part in a Medicare fraud scheme where he ultimately filed $20 million in false claims. The physician, Roberto Rodriguez, billed for fake HIV infusion services at six Miami-area HIV infusion clinics.

But Roskam, of course, has not created this blog because he wants the public to know how effective the administration has been so early in combatting fraud. Rather, Peter Roskam is using the existence of Medicare/Medicaid fraud as an excuse to subvert Democratic efforts to make quality healthcare coverage available to all American citizens, something to which he is ideologically opposed.

Roskam appeared this morning on WBIG 1280 AM this morning promoting his blog. He bemoaned the fact that physicians are reimbursed at such a low rate by Medicare and Medicaid due to the excessive expenditures on fraud and abuse and reiterated that he thought it unwise to pursue universal coverage with fraud so rampant. Roskam offered no solutions however for the 45 million Americans who have no health coverage. He did not even acknowledge them. Under the Roskam plan, they are on their own. You can listen to Roskam here:

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I think Roskam’s focus on Medicare fraud is a lame excuse for not doing what basic justice and decency require – that we provide healthcare to every American. If you agree with me, I encourage you give Peter Roskam a call and demand universal coverage now.  Tell him we’ve got blogs aplenty, we need a health plan. (You can attempt to post a comment on his blog but I expect that will be a waste of time as they are screening out unfavorable comments).  You can reach Peter Roskam at (202) 225-4561 in Washington or at (630) 893-9670 in Bloomingdale.

On Friday, June 26, the House of Representatives passed the historic Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill by a vote of 219 to 212. H.R. 2454, formally titled the American Clean energy and Security Act of 2009 includes a market-based cap & trade global warming reduction plan designed to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 17% by the year 2020. This is not where we need to be. It is thought that we will have to reduce emissions 80% by 2050 in order to stabilize the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere at a level that prevent the worst consequences of global warming. Still the bill is a start and it has won praise from environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC):

“The House of Representatives has made a dramatic breakthrough for America’s future by choosing to create jobs, move to clean energy, and reduce global warming pollution. The passage of this legislation, which was almost unimaginable six months ago, will help set our country in a new direction by shifting to a clean energy economy and reducing the carbon pollution that causes global warming.

“While passing the bill through the House took hard work and compromises on many sides, this is strong and vital legislation that Congress needs to deliver to the President’s desk this year. This bill will help create new jobs in manufacturing and clean technology. It will increase energy efficiency, help consumers save on energy bills, and protect lower-income families. And it will finally put our country on a course to limit the carbon pollution that causes global warming.

Sadly our own Congressman, Republican Peter Roskam, was not a party to that “hard work and compromise”. Roskam voted against the bill, choosing to support the narrow interests of his big campaign donors from the energy sector, who opposed the bill, rather than act to save the planet from an impending catastrophe that threatens the  welfare of our children and of generations to come.

OpenSecrets.org, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics, today released data demonstrating how the industries that have worked to oppose climate change legislation gave, on average, twice the amount of campaign contributions to legislators, Democrat and Republican alike, who, like Roskam, opposed the legislation, as they did to those voting in favor. The table below compares contributions received by industry for the average “yes” voter on H.R. 2454, the average, “no” voter, and for Peter Roskam. Bear in mind that while contributions are totaled back to 1989, Roskam has only been running since 2006.

You can draw your own conclusions but in my estimation this speaks volumes about why Roskam votes as he does.

The climate bill will now have to be taken up by the Senate where the fight is likely to be even tougher than it was in the House. I predict that 6th District residents will be hearing a lot more lobbying against the bill by our Congressman.

This past Thursday, June 25, Peter Roskam spoke on the House floor in favor of an ammendment to H.R. 2647, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. The text of Roskam’s press release is here.

First off, I think Dan Conston got mixed up about what Roskam had to say:

“This is an Administration that has said that Iran has legitimate nuclear ambitions, no they don’t. There is no legitimate pursuit of nuclear power in Iran. It is all for an evil and despicable purpose. This is an Administration that got it wrong on the Iranian dissonance and has, sort of, back peddled over the past several days and recast their support of the dissonance when they really missed the mark.

…[Iran] is an aggressive regime that ought not to be coddled. This is an effort to make sure that all of us are safe, and this is a sacred duty.

I’m pretty sure we heard Peter talking about dissidents in the video, but I could be wrong.

More importantly, I think this kind of overblown rhetoric is decidedly unhelpful. The President didn’t get it wrong. Bush and Cheney and Roskam and their neo-con faction did. Their hostile rhetoric and their bungled invasion of Iraq put us into the dangerous position we are in relative to Iran today.

Roskam’s hostile language will not help Iranian dissidents. It only feeds the perception of an outside threat which helps Ahmadinejad maintain a precarious hold on power. Its terrific political theater for Republicans pandering for votes among a population that has largely rejected their platform but it is lousy foreign policy and can only make things more difficult for President Obama as he strives to deal with a very delicate situation. Roskam should shut up.

Nicholas Burns, who lead the Bush administration’s tardy efforts to negotiate with Iran on nuclear issues has praised President Obama’s handling of the Iran situation. Speaking in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition on June 16, Burns had this to say (thanks to Greg Sargeant’s The Plum Line):

“President Ahmadinejad would like nothing better than to see a very aggressive series of statements by the United States that would try to put the U.S. in the center of this,” Burns said. “And I think President Obama is avoiding that quite rightly.”

“This is not a dispute for the U.S. to be the center of,” Burns said at another point. “It’s up to Iranians to decide who Iran’s future leaders will be. He said he respects Iran’s sovereignty. I think it was important to do that.”

Burns said that Obama was right to refrain from throwing the U.S.’s weight around while giving props to reformers. He praised Obama for being “low-key” while saying he’s concerned about the plight of reformers and inspired by them, which Burns called a “balancing act.”

Even creepy John Negroponte, Bush’s first ambassador to Iraq, has praised Obama for his conduct of foreign policy. Speaking at a review of foreign policy under Obama hosted by the French-America Foundation on June 23, Negroponte said that he had a “high level degree of confidence” in the Obama team, which got “an extremely good start to foreign policy.”

Roskam’s assertion that the President supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a gross distortion based on a much more nuanced remark Obama made this spring. Roskam has a bright future ahead as a commentator for Fox News once we replace him in 2010.

The ammendment that Roskam rose to speak for, and which bore his name failed. It’s point was to restore $1.2 billion in cuts to spending on missile defense over 2009 levels. Missile defense has been an article of religion  for arch-conservatives like Roskam since Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was launched. Programs have cost billions with limited success. The ground-based mid-course defense that Roskam’s ammendment refers to has failed 6 out of 14 intercept tests since 1999. This is a program that is a boon to defense contractors like Boeing, having cost over $30 billion to date, but offers no increased security to this country in the near term. Missile defense programs like these are certainly not a substitute for effective diplomacy in resolving what threat may be posed by Iran. Roskam should let the grown-ups manage foreign policy.

I received a breathless email from Peter Roskam earlier today begging for contributions to his re-election campaign prior to the end of the second quarter  this week.

Roskam writes:

Tomorrow marks the end of the second fundraising quarter, and the Democrats are waiting to see how much money I have raised. Potential challengers are weighing their options even as I write this, and if I show strength, they’ll think twice about running against me.

I am a constant target of the national Democrats and I anticipate they will redouble their efforts this year with Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel in the White House. Rahm tried to take me out in 2006 and 2008, and now he has the power of the White House behind him to pour money from the far left into my opponent’s campaign.

One can dream anyway.

Because of this, we’ve set an aggressive fundraising goal for the second quarter and we’re just $10,000 away from meeting it. Can I count on you to help me reach my fundraising goal by tomorrow at midnight. With your support, I can continue to serve as a voice for you in Congress.

Don’t kid yourself. Unless you are a bank, or a loan company, or a big drug or insurance company,  or a bloated defense contractor,  or a millionaire, Peter Roskam is not your voice in Congress. In fact, Peter Roskam has used his office and his vote consistently to do the opposite of what is in the best interests of you and your family. He has voted against a fair minimum wage for workers, against protections of consumers against predatory lenders, against equal pay for women, against paid parental leave, against  services for Illinois veterans, against efforts to address catastrophic global climate change. And Roskam is currently campaigning against Democratic efforts to provide all Americans with access to healthcare. And Roskam used his position withthe House Financial Servics Committee to fight against the kind of common sense regulation that could have prevented our current economic crisis. When it comes to a choice of doing what is best for big corporations or what is best for working people, Roskam always sides with big corporations. You can read more about Peter Roskam’s anti-consumer, anti-middle-class record here. Worse still, Roskam was an unfailing supporter of the Bush program of endless war, torture, illegal rendition, and domestic eavesdropping.

And Roskam, despite his plea, is not poor. In the 2008 race, Roskam outspent his Democratic opponent, Jill Morgenthaler 3 to 1. You can be sure that in 2010 the same fat cat contributors will make sure Roskam is able to run another nasty campaign of smears and lies. He doesn’t need your $25.

I’d like to be able to suggest that you make a donation to the Democrats instead. But until the Democratic President and Congress step up and do what is right for gay people repeal  DOMA and “Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell”, I won’t be giving them any money – or votes – and do not suggest that you do so. Instead, give your money to two organizations working hard here  to help victims of the Bush-Roskam recession: the Chicago Area Food Depository and DuPage PADS. I split my United Way Contribution between the two organizations and highly endorse their work

In his latest attempt to distract 6th District residents from his absolute refusal to do anything to meet their real needs, Republican Congressman Peter Roskam has launched the “Medi-Fraud Blog” at his Congressional website.  Aside from using your tax dollars to in another misguided public relations scheme to shore up his image in the district, Roskam’s new blog has two main goals:

• To distract you from the real issues in the current national discussion as to how we can best insure the 45 million Americans who currently have no health coverage
• To scare you into believing that real health reform is just too dangerous an undertaking now with all the scary criminals seeking to defraud the government and that the 45 million Americans who don’t have access to the quality healthcare that Roskam’s family receives courtesy of the taxpayers will just have to wait … for oh say 10 to 20 years until we can get this fraud thing under control.

Peter Roskam’s press secretary, Dan, each day will tell you a story about some crooks who made a killing defrauding Medicare – until they got caught. It will be just like  “COPS” on a blog except that everyone will be wearing their shirts.

Well at least this will give you something cool to read while you are performing your own appendectomy at the kitchen table. (This is may not be so bad an idea. My goodfriend Jon had our other friend Tony, who is a pretty good mechanic, sew up a nasty gash in his leg last summer because Jon didn’t have any insurance. It left kind of a big scar but there was no infection. So you can probably do it too – if Roskam doesn’t change his mind about health insurance for everyone).

Did I mention that Peter Roskam is working against universal coverage? Because that is the most important thing you need to know. Your Congressman, Peter Roskam, the one guy who’s job it is to work to  get you a fair shake in Washington, is actively working to defeat any Democratic proposal to give insurance coverage to people here in Illinois who don’t presently have any. It would be too expensive, a misuse of your tax dollars.

And did I mention that Peter Roskam has an excellent health plan for himself and his family, paid for by your tax dollars? I wrote about it once before here. I guess that’s part of why it just doesn’t matter to Congressman Roskam whether we do anything about health reform this year. His family is already taken care of.

So, enjoy Peter’s blog. And be sure and post your comments about what a great Congressman Peter Roskam is because he’s fighting the commies in Washington who want to make sure everybody has healthcare whether they’re rich or a Congressman or not. (Be nice. Dan will be weeding out all the bad things people say). And good luck with that appendectomy.